


we are time's subjects (and time bids be gone)

by ThisIsMyNote



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Faked Suicide, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Secret Intelligence Service | MI6, Slow Burn, but like, it wasnt actually a suicide, probably
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 12:49:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3382133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisIsMyNote/pseuds/ThisIsMyNote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"time is very slow for those who wait<br/>very fast for those who are scared<br/>very long for those who lament<br/>very short for those who celebrate</p><p>but for those who love </p><p>time is eternal"</p><p>Sherlock never really understood the notion of time</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Prologue**

His face was motionless, vacant. His fingers clutched around the neck of the violin, and he lifted it up, as if to play. There was a peace and sincerity about the room. Then he withdrew his fingers as if the instrument was burning, and exited the room. The violin fell to the floor.

Yet you could still hear the music playing. 


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

The philosophy of time is an interesting one. Take fourteen years, for instance, in the eyes of three different people. Person A, as we shall call him, had a happy fourteen years, passing a medical degree at Bart’s, entering the army, being obliterated home, meeting his best friend, and, in one of the inevitable dips of his happiness, meeting his wife. Though he has had times of depression which dragged on for two years, overall, his fourteen years have been happy and therefore have ‘flown by’. But Person B, as I wish for him to remain anonymous, had fourteen years of depression. Self-harm, suicide attempts, drug abuse, faked suicide and the sacrifice of his best friend, A, so that A could be happy. Now before the timer started, B suffered a great loss, the suicide of his best friend, so these fourteen years have dragged past, slower than a snail sliding across sandpaper. Person C’s fourteen years were busy, but also sad, so they went at what one would call a normal pace, spying, thieving, saving and watching from afar.

Now of course one would probably have to define normal pace to get a true view of the time frame. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition is ‘The manual pace achieved by normal effort’, but I wish to expand on that. To most people, normal pace is time progressing in the linear way at a constant speed. Of course, Newton’s second law could be applied to this theory, which states that an object in motion will stay in motion at a constant speed unless an unbalanced force acts upon it. When applying this theory to time, one must obviously make necessary altercations. We can imagine, for instance, that the unbalanced force is perhaps a tragedy or a comedy, which changes the person forever, and possibly their perception of time until another force acts upon it, slowing it to their own interpretation of a normal pace.

Sherlock Holmes, the man beneath the hat, had often pondered this theory. He had pondered it as a boy, confused as to why nobody had considered the confusing factor that time moves faster for some rather than others, A, B and C for instance. He was pondering it while he sat on the plane flying towards his inevitable death. He wondered whether, if she hadn’t done what she had, he would be here today. The loss of a friend through his fault had made him incredibly loyal, though with a small tendency to make friends, and possibly to die for them. That was probably what was going to happen now. He’d solve the case but be refused carriage home, and he knew that Mycroft would quite probably be the one to send the return telegram. He didn’t think that anyone in the Government would vouch for him. Because he thought she was dead.

But he didn’t know, and it hurt.

He didn’t really agree with applying theories of motion to time. It didn’t really make much sense. Newton didn’t write about time, he wrote about motion, and he believed, as she had done, that it was a form of disrespect to apply one theory to another subject. But he was left with no choice as he flew towards Scandinavia. If he couldn’t distract his mind, the regret would weasel in there.

♣♣♣

He furrowed his eyebrows as he looked at the stairs to 221B. Though Sherlock was alive, the place still wrenched up painful memories. Mary stood beside him, her hand in his, and she squeezed it, reassuringly. He bit his lip. John Watson knew that Sherlock wouldn’t be back for six months, and then he didn’t know where the wind would take him. But probably not back to London. Although Sherlock had said his mission would end within six months, John wasn’t as stupid as Sherlock had him down for. He knew that when Sherlock had told him this, he looked to his left, which is a sign of thinking of a lie, so John concluded that if Sherlock’s mission did indeed finish in six months, it would most likely be with Sherlock’s death.

He stepped onto the first stair, Mary now behind him, and shook his head to remove the eerie echoing of Bach’s Sonato 1 in G Minor rolling around his ears. They would have to arrange another funeral if Sherlock was killed, and probably have to pay for the body’s passage back to England, as Sherlock was a ‘murderer’, and a traitor to his country. Not that Sherlock was a patriot. Sherlock agreed with Bertrand Russell on this, that patriotism was the willingness to kill and die for trivial reasons. John didn’t agree with him on this, but he did agree that nationality is only skin deep, and that wars should not be fought between countries, but between the good and evil. Well, that’s what John thought anyway. Sherlock believed that war was wrong.

Sherlock had never told John about her. It was Mycroft, who, over (ironically) fish and chips on a Friday evening, told John how Sherlock had a friend before, from school. They’d done everything together. Boiling, burning, investigating, eating… in her case anyway. But Sherlock seemed to care for her, and it scared him. He shut her out when she needed him most, and three weeks later they found her. Dead. Sherlock went blank, and was in his room ceaselessly. He wouldn’t venture into the real world, and they had to send him back to school before term began to stop him closing up completely. So he became cold, emotionless, and started to do what they had done best. Solve.

When John fell out of his train of thought, he was surprised to see that he had reached the top of the stairs. The door was closed. Why was it closed? Sherlock wanted the place to be open as a Tolkien book, even if he wasn’t. It was a dirty white now, and though he could tell that there was a difference, he couldn’t remember for the life of him what it was. He pressed his ear against the door, at the point where one may place a hand if they are to push it open. To his surprise, it was warm, and he could hear breathing from inside. For a moment, John’s heart stopped, and he almost believed it was Sherlock, back from the dead a second time, until he realised the breathing was shallower, and…

“Come in, Dr Watson. Please. I need help.” John stiffened, and Mary blanched. He knew it was a woman. He hoped not The Woman. But it wouldn’t be. Her voice was much sharper, and her tone politer. Nervously, he pushed open the door.

The sight that was revealed was very different from what they had imagined. Instead of what you may have imagined had it been Moriarty sitting in John’s chair, the room was immaculate. Mary noticed not one thing, excluding the rug on John’s chair, had been moved. The tea was half drunk in the mug in the kitchen, chemistry equipment on the table and around the hallway to Sherlock’s room. And John realised that he missed living here, and the chase and the thrill of it all. But as his eyes travelled over his chair, which had been replaced since the identification of his wife, he saw a figure hunched up in his rug. Its legs were hanging over the arm and its arms were clutching at a file in front of its chest. If he hadn’t heard it hear him simply breathing, he’d think she (for that was the gender of the voice, you’ll remember) was homeless. It stood up, and blinked at him, beseechingly.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But the door was open…” and with that she fainted, falling out of his chair. Years of medical training kicked in. John rushed to the girl, dropping to his knees, and checked she was alive, and that all her vitals were ago.

“What’s wrong with her? Why did she faint? Is she OK?” Mary queried from her position in the door.

“I can’t see anything wrong with her.” He furrowed his eyebrows, and Mary’s hand subconsciously went to the pocket of her jeans, and her fingers curled around the barrel of the gun there.

♣♣♣

“She must have collapsed from exhaustion.” John murmured to his wife as they carried the girl to the sofa. She had to refrain from smirking as they placed her down gently on the leather upholstery.

“ _Good. Very good._ ” Said the voice in her earpiece. “ _You’re doing excellently. Now, a small difficulty has arisen, one that requires Dr and Mrs Watson, so I’m going to phone them now. I don’t want a single movement from you, not even a twitch. You know that I can see you, and it’s that Romanian placement if you don’t succeed. There’s opened a vacancy, and I’m rather pressurised to fill it._ ”

‘Why was he so difficult?’ she wondered. ‘He could simply say “don’t move” and she’d obey. Why did he have to be so…’ her train of thought was interrupted a ringing, and it took all of her strength not to leap out of her skin as Mary removed her cool fingers from her forehead to answer it.

“It’s Mycroft, John…” she called through to the kitchen, where her husband was stirring two cups of tea. “He says to make our way to the airport we just left, and to leave our guest where she is.”

“Huh? That’s odd. I thought he was gone for good.” John sunk into another chair. “He doesn’t like permanent placement, does he?”

Mary sighed, and rested her hand on her husband’s arm.

“He does it for you, John. It’s all for you. He’d have died at Magnussen’s, if he hadn’t felt you needed him. Trust me, I know. I bet his life on it.” She raised her head and smiled at him. “You know as well as I do that he would have died on this mission, and here we are, getting called back to the airfield where we said goodbye less than an hour ago. Luck, if you believe in such things, is on Sherlock’s side, John.” She furrowed her eyebrows, and looked at John with serenity. “And on that happy note, I’ve forgotten my coat.”

John smiled back at her.

“Let’s go get it. We don’t want you to be coatless.”

♣♣♣

“Sherlock, slow down. You’re saying that Moriarty’s been alive this whole time, and you knew? I mean, what?” John was trying very hard to stay calm.

“Yes.” Sherlock was evidently not in any mood for conversation.

“He strapped me to a bomb and all you can say is yes?” John raised his voice hysterically, ignoring Mary’s soft hand on his arm. “At least tell me how,” he managed after a while. “And how you know.”

“Obviously,” came the voice, completely void of any emotion, from behind him. “Moriarty had led me to believe that there was a key code that would unlock any door, open any vault, cra-”

“Rambling, Sherlock…”  Mary interjected helpfully from next to him.

Sherlock sighed, and lowered his head in mock defeat.

“Moriarty led me to think that this key code was binary form of two bars from a lesser known piece of Bach’s composition. Every note a one, every rest a zero. John knows this. But, when I tapped out this code on the rooftop, I tapped it out incorrectly, checking an idea I had theorised a while ago. If there had been a key code, Moriarty would have noticed I had got it wrong. But he didn’t mention it, so this led me to two conclusions. Either Moriarty was a fake, or the key code was invaluable in the larger scale of his plans. Of course, you could draw more from this, but I idiotically did not think of the other possibilities; I was too busy considering the safest ways to ‘die’. So these were the thoughts at the front of my mind.

When Moriarty put a bullet through his brain, I (stupidly upon reflection) closed my eyes and stumbled backwards. It’s human instinct; no one wants a shot in their face. If Moriarty was a fake, he may have reacted differently dying, so he relied on me closing my eyes.

But if it was a fake, who was it? Remember how we thought Moriarty had created Richard Brook using the key code? Well, if there wasn’t a key code, how did he create Richard Brook? The answer is, he didn’t. This plan was probably planned years in advance, giving a henchman, or perhaps a relative of Moriarty’s time to create an alias, Richard Brook, The Storyteller. Of course, I may not be right, but that’s why it took me two years to dismantle his network, and I was so thorough. I knew he would return, and it would be harder for him to establish his stand if he lacked support.” Sherlock leant back, sighing at his deduction.

“Wow.” John whispered. “That was amazing.”

“But you leave so man-” Mary persisted.

“My theory is not necessarily correct. I don’t fully know how he did it, I just knew that he did.” Sherlock said, closing his eyes, signalling the end of the conversation. “Oh, and Mary, take me to Baker Street. I’d rather be at my home than yours.”

Mary nodded, realising Sherlock was probably not expecting a homeless woman on his sofa. She looked at John, who opened his mouth.

“Sherl-” he began.

“Shut up,” came the terse reply. “I’m thinking.”

“You’re always thinking. It’s a part of being you. But if you’d let me finish…”

“Which my overly efficient mass of brain tissue elects to be a poor decision. I shall  _allow_  you to bother me when we return to Baker Street. But until then, the man who ‘strapped you to a bomb’ has worse intentions and I should like to ponder about what they are. Is that good enough for you?”

♣♣♣

“Wilson.” Mycroft sneered as he entered the flat.

“Is that glorious face because of the flat,” enquired the woman on the sofa, “because if it isn’t I’ll have you know that I showered specially.” She turned her body to face him, and flashed him a twisted smile that mirrored his own. “Or did someone nick your cake this morning? I know how that irks you… Mikey”

“For once, Wilson, could you be a professional?” He shook his head as she opened her mouth to retort. “Sherlock will be back soon. I helped you when you wanted to  _disappear_ and you can bloody well help me now.” He ignored her look of confusion. “Reveal yourself when you choose, but do it right or it’s a nice holiday to Romania for you.”

♣♣♣

Sherlock seemed to test his footing as he climbed the wooden stairs. Four people had walked up them this morning. John and Mary, Mycroft, and someone else, someone who wasn’t naturally light on their feet but treaded gently. Someone, a woman, who was roughly 5’5”, had walked regally up the stairs before tripping on the eighth step, and stumbling up the remaining ones. Someone who hadn’t left.

“Why the HELL is there a woman in my flat?” He shouted to Mycroft when he reached the top of the stairs. John looked at him as if he was mad, then realisation crossed over his face. He opened his mouth to shift the blame, however much he disliked Mycroft, to himself. Sherlock turned to him and looked horrified as he realised it wasn’t Mycroft who’d invited the woman in, but his unimpressive, though compassionate best friend.

“I thought I’d let her explain herself.” Replied Mycroft. “Give her a chance to do that, would you Sherlock? You never did before.” And he stepped aside to clear Sherlock’s vision.

John and Mary’s faces showed surprise as much as Sherlock’s showed horror. That short scared woman ‘in’ with Mycroft? Well, they’d never had believed it unless they heard it from Mycroft himself.

And Sherlock blanched.

“Y-You were dead.”


End file.
